ART AND DESIGN SCHOOL TOL: RISD/Brighton Exchange ProgramAuthor(s): Martha HallSource: Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 6,No. 1 (Spring 1987), pp. 29-30Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27947714 .

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Art Documentation, Spring 1987 29

tiously. He also approaches specialized dealers' catalogs as any librarian-bibliographer does: promptly and with the focus of the collection as well as its budget in mind.

Not all the items in the Rare Book Room have been ac quired by Dean Perkins. Some of them may have been Fine Arts Library acquisitions which were subsequently trans ferred into the Rare Book Room. Dean Perkins admits that there has been no firm rule for deciding what does get placed in the Rare Book Room. Cost may have been a criterion but subject matter may be a more decisive factor. Whatever the criteria, Dean Perkins did have something to do with the decision.

Micheline Nilsen University of Pennsylvania

ART AND DESIGN SCHOOL TOL edited by Martha Hall

As most of the members of the Art and Design School Type of Library Group are aware, Jim Findlay, Director of the Rhode Island School of Design Library, is spending approximately six months in Brighton, England. He has been participating in an exchange program with Lyn Turpin of the Brighton Poly technic Library. What follows are some of Jim's insights and experiences from Brighton, both personal and professional. Of particular interest are his comments on the staff organiza tion at Brighton and his comparison of it to the staff structure at RISD.

RISD/Brighton Exchange Program On arriving at the Brighton Polytechnic's Faculty of Art and

Design Library the first day, I felt especially welcome because I had to step over an errant courgette (American: zucchini) from the adjacent municipal fruit and vegetable market. Be cause I am a vegetarian, one of my main concerns before going to Brighton was the availability of fresh produce. I con sidered the courgette to have been a very good omen and, so far, that assessment has proven to have been accurate, both in terms of food and work. The transition to British art and design school librarianship

has turned out to have been much less disruptive than I had anticipated. I'm surprised, actually, by the similarities of the two systems. Just as Lyn Turpin, my counterpart at RISD, noted in one of her recent letters commenting on American and British art students and the similarities of their "look," so too there appear to exist laws which govern the organization al "look," at least of British and American art school libraries. As in U.S. libraries, the Brighton Polytechnic suffers from lack of adequate space, insufficient staffing and funds, the va garies of national and local accreditation board decisions, and faculty upheavals, reorganizations, and political machinations.

There are, however, also many significant differences. The Polytechnic's coll?gial and democratic approach to staff or ganization differs from most American libraries. At RISD the library staff structure is hierarchical, whereas at Brighton all of the non-professional positions are at the same level and all of the professional positions are at another higher level. The non-professionals at RISD are graded according to the degree of difficulty of the work they perform. At Brighton the library assistants are all more or less on the same administrative and salary level: the circulation, the interlibrary loans, the periodi cals check-in, and the technical processing assistants all re ceive approximately the same salary and have approximately the same amount of responsibility, and in fact, their positions are easily interchangeable. Since all positions are graded equally there is no room for an employee to advance within the library or polytechnic system. Consequently, long-term employees become frustrated and low morale is an issue which has to be dealt with regularly.

The Brighton Polytechnic has a very generous and detailed staff training and development scheme which is quite impres

sive when compared to the American equivalent. Much of the time, effort, and money, however, is spent training people to move on to positions outside the school simply because there is little room for advancement from within. Obviously, en hancing job-related knowledge contributes much toward the degree of on-the-job satisfaction the employee experiences, but at the same time it is imaginably frustrating because a commensurate salary enhancement is virtually unobtainable.

The professional library staff structure and organization is again quite efficient and laudatory. In effect there are three reference librarians in a library of approximately half the size of RISD serving a student body of 850, again less than half the student population of RISD. Obviously, the reference li brarians, or Course Resources Officers as they are known here, are able to apportion detailed attention to students with in specific course areas falling under their purview. The ar rangement is enormously beneficial not simply in terms of course offerings but also in more personal one-on-one user instruction for students and staff. On the other hand, having all professional librarians perform the same type of general function: orientation, book ordering, shelving, bibliographic checking, and account record keeping, means that each process is duplicated many times within the same library.

I have been unable to discern any appreciable difference in the creativity levels of American and British art school stu dents. Some students do have a more bizarre "outward" ap pearance and they do seem to be very much less willing or able to be as freely expressive as American students, but underneath they actually are very similar. I do, however, ac cept that U.S. students work harder, or at least longer hours, than their British counterparts. At RISD lights blaze into the

wee hours of the night in classrooms, studios, and the library. That doesn't occur at Brighton. In addition, most American students also hold part-time jobs, a concept which is prac tically unheard of in the United Kingdom.

In the end, however, the differences and complexities are what the exchange program is all about, and by pointing out differences I do not in any sense mean to imply criticism. I view the purpose of the exchange to be the promotion of better understanding between our two institutions, and by extension, between our two countries. I do not believe that one system is better than the other, but rather that there are different approaches to similar problems, and that the ap proaches are colored by tradition, culture, political and eco nomic conditions, and that general solutions, of necessity, should be viewed in light of those factors. That is not to say, of course, that much can not be gained from a foreign per spective and outlook. I look forward to returning to the Rhode Island School of Design Library and to taking with me the best of what the Brighton Polytechnic has to offer, and at the same time, I hope I will have contributed to Brighton in a positive and informed manner.

On a more personal note, I have been completely charmed by Brighton and South East England, especially the coun tryside and the eighty-mile long hiking trail known as the South Downs Way. I'm awestruck that while walking on the trail one is obliged to open a gate to a field where sheep and cattle are grazing, pass by the herds, and exit on the other side without incurring the property owner's wrath, or without letting the animals escape. I can't imagine anything more re laxing or soothing than to picnic on the Downs overlooking pastoral settings on one side and magnificent vistas of the sea on the other. The British countryside is indeed an interna tional treasure.

I've finally become accustomed to British currency, al though I'm still a little preplexed as to why the pound coin is so small (about the size of an American nickel but heavier) and the 50 pence coin so much larger (about the size of a U.S. half dollar), and yet the smaller coin is worth twice as much.

Riding a bicycle here presents a formidable challenge. I feel vulnerable enough on a bicycle without the added worry of constantly having to remind myself that I am supposed to be in the left-hand lane of traffic. I'm terrified that in an emergen cy I would instinctively go to the other side.

Before going to Great Britian, I considered myself to be bilingual: English and Spanish. After having been here for three months, however, I now consider myself to be tri

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30 Art Documentation, Spring 1987

lingual: American English, British English, and Spanish. En glish pronunciation is sometimes so startlingly distinct that hearing the following words, for example, renders them vir tually unintelligible: controversy, Nicaragua, and macram?. Other words are simply different: issue and discharge books for check books in and out, trolley for book truck, and stock for collection.

And finally, when I return to the U.S., I can't imagine how I will survive without BBC radio and television.

I I PUBLIC TOL edited by Elizabeth De Marco

Fine Arts Division J. Erik Jonsson Central Library Dallas Public Library System

Since April 1982, the staff of the Fine Arts Division has enjoyed the spacious quarters of the entire fourth floor of the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library. Our facilities now cover nearly an acre of open stacks, reference areas, study carrels, offices, periodicals reading area, limited access storage, a Listening Center with 40,000 recordings, and a small Gallery for print and photography exhibits. The present staff of fifteen in cludes five subject specialists in the visual arts, the perform ing arts, music, recordings, and sports.

Fine Arts' collections have been built over an eighty-year period and reflect the needs of our diverse patrons as well as the limitations of an ever-fluctuating budget. Currently we house about 70,000 volumes of reference and circulating titles including all of the Dewey 700's and supporting reference

material in many disciplines. Over 600 periodicals are taken and, thanks to a generous amount of storage?at least for the present?we are able to keep print rather than microform copies of all but a few titles. A subject index to the periodicals collection has been developed on microcomputer using PC File III. Since there are over 250 titles just in art, architecture, interior design, photography and crafts, this subject index

serves a number of patron needs. Extensive vertical files (containing over a quarter of a mil

lion items) have been built over the past thirty-two years on film, theatre, dance, music and art. Archival materials on local arts institutions are being acquired regularly and large seg ments of them have been processed with the aid of grants. The Division has administered over $95,000 in funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and local donors. Early Dallas theatre and entertainment history are documented in several collections and a computerized index of entertain ment reviews from 1925-1986 forms the basis for many inquiries. The Dallas Public Library has built strong ties with the arts

organizations in the area?through cooperative projects in the arts, the acquisition and maintenance of archival collections, the mounting of exhibits, sponsorship of lectures and perfor mances at the library, as well as the continued support of research by students and professionals. Since opening in 1982, we have presented hundreds of arts-related activities including film festivals, play readings, popular and chamber

music series, lectures, exhibits of paintings, prints, sculpture, costume, theatre design, photography, and archives. Virtually every aspect of the visual and performing arts has been pre sented for thousands of library patrons.

The years 1985 and 1986 were particularly interesting in terms of the exhibits and programs planned by the staff. We collaborated on three different projects with the Dallas Mu seum of Art: an exhibit featuring the handprinted books of Leonard and Virginia Woolf (based on Donna E. Rhein's book for UMI Research Press); an event sponsored by the Sony Corporation, "Video as a Creative Medium"; and a "Mail Art" workshop for kids directed by Jonathan Held. Two guest lec tures and a recent conference on Women Artists were jointly presented by the Fine Arts Division and the Dallas chapter of the Women's Caucus for Art. The most important archival

exhibit, "Dallas on Stage," featured the collective histories of ten Dallas theatres.

The Fine Arts Division became well known for its photogra phy series in 1984-85, a varied program entitled FOCUS/ DALLAS which was conceived by former staff member Kin ney Littlefield. Major photographers including Lewis Baltz, Marie Cosindas, Philip Trager, Ann Noggle, Jerry Uelsmann, and others were brought to speak at the Library during ex hibits of their works. The entire series was documented on video. FOCUS/DALLAS also involved the commissioning of ten photographers to document the downtown area during a period of two years. The exhibit formed from these works was cosponsored by the business community and was a huge success.

The budget cuts which the Library suffered this past year affected the programming possibilities for Fine Arts as well as the entire Library system. Grants, full sponsorship, and collab orative events may still take place, but many of our oppor tunities will have to be put aside. Fortunately, the collection budget is roughly the same, about $38,000 for standing orders and periodicals and $64,000 for books and recordings. Gifts of materials and funds may bring in up to $10,000 more. We are pleased that the cuts were not more severe and that no loss of staff occurred. Perhaps by the time ARLIS comes to Dallas, the cuts will be a historical aneodote!

Jane M. Holahan Dallas Public Library

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